The media is awash this week with the exciting news that the TV adaption of Hilary’s final book is in production.

Of course the stage production of the novel has sadly been and gone. It was brilliantly scripted by Hilary herself in collaboration with her friend and actor Ben Miles, who reprised his part as Thomas Cromwell. The script is available in book form for those who want to see how they adapted almost one thousand pages into a gripping live drama.

Both Ben Miles and Aurora Dawson-Hunte will be speaking at the Wolf Hall Weekend about their experiences in playing such famous characters on stage and working with Hilary.

The subject of adaptation was the topic and the title of Hilary’s fifth and final Reith Lecture in 2017. A copy of the talk can be found in her latest book, A Memoir of My Former Self. In her talk Hilary speaks about her views on the individual quality of the adaptations of her novels and reveals some thought provoking insights:

‘In these lectures I’ve argued that fiction, if well written, doesn’t betray history, but opens up its essential nature to inspection. When fiction is turned into theatre, or into a film or TV, the same applies: there is no necessary treason. Each way of telling, each medium for telling, draws a different potential from the original. Adaptation, done well, is not a secondary process, a set of grudging compromises – but an act of creation in itself.’

At that lecture in Stratford Upon Avon was Peter Kosminsky himself, the director of all three of the TV adaptations of Hilary’s Trilogy. Here’s a transcript of his conversation with Hilary:

SUE LAWLEY: ‘Now on the front row here, we have Peter Kosminsky, who directed the television adaptations of Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies. Famously Peter, and somewhat controversially, you lit them – because we were talking about lighting – by candlelight. I mean, did you two agree that? Was that collusion or did he rush off and – or did you approve, Hilary? 

HILARY MANTEL: When Peter and I first met, what I said to him is, “When I imagine this book…I didn’t really have to say about lights and shades, candlelight.” I think he just knew that, but I remember saying to Peter, “In every frame of the book, on every page in every transaction I see the wobble of the handheld camera, which brings me back to witnessing and reliability.” And I think your face illuminated my sitting room at that point, because I think it was catching onto your thought about what the mode of the drama should be. 

SUE LAWLEY: Was this a Eureka moment, Peter? 

PETER KOSMINSKY: Well I tended to work with handheld cameras so it was more like, you know, I have to be honest and say I was feeling a little bit like what am I doing here, taking on this extraordinary project sitting opposite this double Booker Prize Winner and when Hilary said that to me, I just felt well, maybe there’s just an iota of legitimacy here. But Hilary, I actually wanted to ask you about a film I and my colleagues made some years before I was privileged to work on your extraordinary books. I made a film for BBC about British soldiers keeping the peace in Bosnia, and sometime after I was there I attended a BBC programme review meeting. And the Deputy Head of BBC News said to me, “I don’t know why we bothered with our daily news broadcasts from 10 Bosnia, putting our reporters in harm’s way” and you’ll remember Martin Bell was injured covering the war in Bosnia. When you guys can sit back five years later and tie it up neatly in a bow. When drama reflects on events from a distance, whether it’s five years of five hundred years, what do you think is gained and what is lost? 

HILARY MANTEL: Perspective. If you want the immediate truthful, in a way, ragged response, you respond as a journalist. You report but you haven’t got the perspective. You have the immediacy. Writers of historian or writers of historical novelist, you have the perspective. You know how it played out. Your duty then is to lift the burden of hindsight and it’s to put your view up or your reader right back in that situation. In the moment, where it was all to play for, when nobody knew what would happen in the next heartbeat…And I think that really is the whole point of the fictional project, if I extend that to mean film and TV. We are connecting emotionally and we shouldn’t be ashamed for saying that, because what we are trying to give our viewer or reader is an experience of what it might’ve been like to be there, which is rather different from the collected wise after the event view that commentators and historians offer.

Make sure you join us on the weekend of June 22nd and 23rd, 2024, as we discuss Hilary’s magnificent legacy with help from celebrity actors and writers such as:

Ben Miles

Aurora Dawson-Hunte